11 years old

Last week, at the hacking convention DEFCON, 11-year-old Emmett Brewer hacked into a replica of Florida’s election website, changing its voting results. It took him less than 10 minutes. When I was 11, “Mario Kart 64” had just come out, so yeah, that’s sort of what I was up to. [PBS]

50 eye diseases

Google’s DeepMind, after tackling chess and Go, has helped develop a deep learning AI system that can identify more than 50 eye diseases from 3D scans and recommend treatment. Despite this apparent improvement in diagnoses, I didn’t even know there were more than 50 eye diseases, and thus my dread level has increased. [The Verge]

$289.2 million

On Friday, a California jury found that Roundup and Ranger Pro weed killers were a “substantial danger” to consumers, ordering their maker, Monsanto, to pay close to $300 million to a man with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Studies have produced mixed results about whether glyphospate, the weed killers’ active ingredient, causes cancer. Shares of Bayer, which bought Monsanto in June, dropped sharply on the news, and this case is reportedly “the first of many.” [The Wall Street Journal]

3-run walk-off uncaught third strike

The most beautiful thing about baseball is that despite how many damn games there are, you can still always see something you’ve never ever seen before — and sometimes a thing that no one has seen before. Case in point: The A-league Wisconsin Timber Rattlers overcame a four-run ninth-inning deficit with the help of a two-out, bases-loaded, walk-off, three-run dropped third strike. [Deadspin]

$15,000 a month

Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former senior adviser to President Trump and reality show contestant before that, has a book coming out. (But I mean, come on, who doesn’t?) A string of recordings — including one where she’s fired in the White House situation room — and claims made in the book have been trickling out ahead of its publication. The latest of these is that the Trump campaign offered Manigault Newman a $15,000-a-month job in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement that would have prevented her from discussing in detail her time in the White House. In a break from past administrations, NDAs have been aggressively employed by Trump. [The Washington Post]

0 black senior officials

Manigault Newman was fired eight months ago, and today none of Trump’s senior White House officials are black, according to CNN’s review of 48 such officials. “Only a handful” are of Latino, Asian or Arab descent. Trump’s corps of advisers is “overwhelmingly white.” [CNN]

811 candidates

As of Aug. 7, 811 people had appeared this year on ballots in open Democratic primaries. My colleagues, in partnership with ABC News and Ballotpedia, gathered data on every single one of them, to see what was making these Democratic races — and Democratic primary voters — tick. Among many other findings: Women won 65 percent of the races that featured at least one man and one woman. [FiveThirtyEight]

100s of counter-protesters

“Fewer than 20” white nationalists showed up for the second “Unite the Right” rally, in Lafayette Park outside the White House, a year after the chaotic and tragic event in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meanwhile, hundreds of counter-protesters turned out in Lafayette Park, and thousands more overall. [NBC News]

$141.5 million

“The Meg,” an expensive Hollywood killer-shark flick with a confusing name and 48-percent green splat on Rotten Tomatoes, was a surprise hit at the box office, earning $141.5 million in its opening weekend (domestically and abroad). Issues of accounting for taste and whether or not it can be done aside, that is already enough to put “The Meg” eighth on the all-time “Shark” genre list, according to Box Office Mojo — right below “Jaws 3-D” and right above “47 Meters Down.” [The New York Times]

264 strokes

Brooks Koepka — 28, from Florida — held off a resurgent Tiger Woods to win the PGA Championship, the final major of the golf season. It was Koepka’s second major win of the year, and his 264 shot total over 72 holes at the Bellerive Country Club outside St. Louis tied the all-time major record. [CBS Sports]

25 centimeters a year

Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia and home to 10 million people, is the fastest sinking city in the world. Its land is swampy, it abuts a sea, and 13 different rivers snake through it. Parts of the city are sinking as fast as 25 centimeters a year. According to scientific models, 95 percent of Jakarta will be submerged by 2050. [BBC]

2,000 Facebook employees

Facebook’s 430,000 square foot main campus in Menlo Park, California, offers many late capitalism employee perks including, of course, free food. But at its planned new office, in Mountain View, California, where 2,000 employees are slated to work, free food won’t be offered. This is thanks (or I guess no thanks, depending on where you work) to a city requirement banning the practice after restaurants there complained that Google workers, also in Mountain View, never came out of the office to eat. [NPR]

]]>188457Oliver Roederhttps://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/oliver-roeder/oliver.roeder@fivethirtyeight.comWhere On Earth Is The Riddler?https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-on-earth-is-the-riddler/
Fri, 10 Aug 2018 12:00:17 +0000https://fivethirtyeight.com/?post_type=fte_features&p=188238Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. There are two types: Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either,1 and you may get a shoutout in next week’s column. If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.

Quick announcement: Have you enjoyed the puzzles in this column? If so, I’m pleased to tell you that we’ve collected many of the best, along with some that have never been seen before, in a real live book! It’s called “The Riddler,” and it will be released in October — just in time for loads of great holidays. It’s a physical testament to the mathematical collaboration that you, Riddler Nation, have helped build here, which in my estimation is the best of its kind. So I hope you’ll check out the book, devour the puzzles anew, and keep adding to our nation by sharing the book with loved ones.

And now, to this week’s puzzles!

Riddler Express

From David Nusbaum, a paradoxical navigational puzzle:

Describe where on Earth from which you can travel one mile south, then one mile east and then one mile north and arrive at your original location.

Riddler Classic

Jerry Meyers welcomes you to the rug game, kid:

A manufacturer, Riddler Rugs, produces a random-pattern rug by sewing 1-inch-square pieces of fabric together. The final rugs are 100 inches by 100 inches, and the 1-inch pieces come in three colors: midnight green, silver, and white. The machine randomly picks a 1-inch fabric color for each piece of a rug. Because the manufacturer wants the rugs to look random, it rejects any rug that has a 4-by-4 block of squares that are all the same color. (Its customers don’t have a great sense of the law of large numbers, or of large rugs, for that matter.)

What percentage of rugs would we expect Riddler Rugs to reject? How many colors should it use in the rug if it wants to manufacture a million rugs without rejecting any of them?

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Last week found you operating a going dried-fruit concern. One day, you loaded your drying shed with 1,000 kilograms of apricots, which were 99 percent water. After a day in the shed, they were 98 percent water. How much did they weigh then?

They weighed 500 kilograms.

At first blush, this number seems way too low. Their water content only decreased 1 percentage point, after all. But let’s break it down.

The apricots started off as 99 percent water — that is, 1 percent not water. That 1 percent weighs 10 kilograms.

After the drying, they are 98 percent water — so the 10 not water kilograms are now 2 percent of the total weight.

The percentage of nonwater doubled, which means the weight of the apricots was cut in half. Therefore, the total weight must be 500 kilograms.

Delicious.

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Last week we flipped a coin to play a game. If we flipped heads, we won. But if we flipped tails, the game continued, and we then needed to flip two heads in a row to win. If we happened to flip another tails before we did that, we then needed three heads in a row to win, and so on. We may flip a potentially infinite number of times, always needing to flip a series of N heads in a row to win, where N is T + 1 and T is the number of cumulative tails tossed. We won if and when we flipped the required number of heads in a row. What are the chances of winning this game?

They are about 71.1 percent.

It’s natural, at first, to guess that your chances of winning are 100 percent. You can flip the damn coin forever, after all, and given enough time it seems like you’d be guaranteed to get the heads you need. But that isn’t quite right. It becomes so difficult to win if you start to toss a few dreaded tails that your chances of winning, even with an infinite number of flips, converge to something less than 100 percent. Don’t get unlucky early, or there may be no coming back.

To figure this one out, it helps to think first about the chances of losing rather than the chances of winning.

Let \(P(T)\) be that probability of losing when we’ve flipped our Tth tail. Two things can happen from here. One, we could flip the \(T+1\) heads in a row that we need to win. This happens with probability \((1/2)^{T+1}\). Or two, we could flip another tails before we do that. That happens the rest of the time. So now \(P(T)\), or probability of losing, looks like this:

In other words, if we don’t flip our requisite \(T+1\) heads in a row, we wind up in the situation where we lose with probability \(P(T+1)\).

The probability of winning this game is one minus the probability of losing at the beginning, or \(1-P(0)\). We can get to that number by multiplying together all the chances throughout the game that we don’t win and subtracting that from one:

Tess Huelskamp shared her programmatic approach using Python, and Lewis Curtis Millholland V created a simulator where you can play the game yourself — you don’t even need to go digging in your couch for a real coin!

More than 760,000 competitors

More than 760,000 people entered the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship this year. The winner of the Excel division, claimant to the fantastic title World Excel Champion and surely now the most popular kid in his high school if there is any justice in the world, was 15-year-old Kevin Dimaculangan of Florida. [CNN]

30 percent increase in newsprint prices

The Trump administration’s tariffs on Canadian newsprint have dealt another blow to already staggering local newspapers, forcing cuts in staff and (literally) narrower coverage. Also, by one estimate, U.S. newsprint prices will increase 30 percent over the next year or two. [The New York Times]

82 percent with “warm” feelings

In November 2016, 87 percent of Donald Trump voters had “warm” feelings toward the man, according to a Pew Research Center survey. By March 2018, these numbers had cooled only very little: 82 percent of Trump voters retained warm feelings toward him. For my part, I’ve long been incapable of any feeling. [Pew Research Center]

9-point scandals

In light of the arrest of Chris Collins, the Republican U.S. House member from New York, on charges of insider trading, my colleague Nate Silver looked into how much “scandals” hurt incumbents running for re-election. Quite a bit, it turns out. Since 1998, “scandal-plagued” incumbents won re-election by an average of 21.5 points, but this was compared to a projected margin of victory of 30.5 points. Scandals, therefore, cost about 9 points. [FiveThirtyEight]

15 percent of MoviePass users

Embattled MoviePass recently limited to three the number of movies its subscribers can see a month. Only 15 percent were seeing more than three movies a month using the service, according to the company, but some of those were really using the service. One bought tickets to “Avengers: Infinity War” six times but never went. Another saw “Lady Bird” six times. One said he went to a theater more than 570 days in a row. And one used it so he could have access to a public restroom in the public-restroom-sparse New York City. [BuzzFeed]

66 percent for government-paid tuition

Last month, a PR agency founded by the conservative and very rich Koch brothers commissioned an opinion poll on U.S. policy issues. Eighty-four percent of the respondents said that enforcing equal rights for all was a “very effective” or “somewhat effective” solution to overcoming social barriers. That number was 85 percent for encouraging scientific and technological innovation, 77 percent for ending harsh sentences for nonviolent crimes, 69 percent for more regulation of Wall Street, and 66 percent for government-paid college tuition. A Koch-backed group, probably needless to say, campaigned against government-paid tuition in 2016. [The Intercept]

26.5 million viewers

The Oscars — which garnered a record low 26.5 million viewers last year — will try and improve the ratings for its live awards telecast by telecasting fewer of its awards live. It will also introduce an award for “outstanding achievement in popular film.” Because as we all know the things that truly deserve to be awarded are those things that have already been richly rewarded. [The Hollywood Reporter]

13-point overperformance

“5 for 5!” and “RED WAVE!” President Trump declared on Twitter yesterday following Tuesday’s special election results. But those exclamations are not exactly fair readings of what went down. In Ohio’s 12th District, for example, Republican Troy Balderson appeared to edge out Democrat Danny O’Connor — but that was a Democratic overperformance of 13 percentage points compared to the district’s partisan lean, in line with the 16-point average overperformance in federal special elections so far. [FiveThirtyEight]

4 million miles from the Sun

A NASA spacecraft called the Parker Solar Probe is embarking on a journey toward the Sun this weekend, where it will endeavor to solve some solar scientific mysteries. It will get within 4 million miles of the star, closer than any spacecraft before it, where temperatures reach 3 million degrees Fahrenheit. But don’t worry, it’s a dry heat. [The Verge]

541 million years ago

Speaking of scientific mysteries, something like half a billion years ago there were things called Ediacaran organisms that dominated our planet’s seas. They were very weird and made up of “branched fronds with a strange fractal architecture.” Were they algae, or fungi, or from some lost kingdom of life? No one could figure it out. But researchers, studying hundreds of their fossils, have now concluded that these fractal lifeforms were animals, unlike any we know today. [Science]

1 Muslim woman

And speaking of elections, Rashida Tlaib won the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 13th district and will run unopposed in November. That positions her to become the first Muslim woman in Congress. [The New York Times]

$570,900 in avoided losses

Christopher Collins, a Republican Congressman from New York, was arrested yesterday and charged with insider trading. According to the indictment, he learned a drug trial had failed thanks to his position on a biotech company board. He is said to have traded on the information, avoiding $570,900 in losses, while his son and another defendant did the same, avoiding $768,000 in losses. “We are confident he will be completely vindicated and exonerated,” Collins’s attorneys said. [AP]

43 percent of Republicans

A public opinion poll conducted by Ipsos found that a plurality — 43 percent — of Republicans agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Twenty-three percent of Republicans agreed that “President Trump should close down mainstream news outlets, like CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.” [Daily Beast]

$420 a share

Elon Musk, Twitter power-user and CEO of Tesla, did a tweet on Tuesday afternoon: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Tesla stock jumped, and trading was suspended for a bit. At $420 a share, the company would be worth about $71 billion. Less than an hour after that first tweet, though, Musk tweeted “Good morning ” so really who knows what’s happening. [CNBC]

4,563 mph

China says it has tested its first hypersonic aircraft, which can travel at 4,563 mph, or Mach 6 — six times the speed of sound. This development puts pressure on the U.S. military but sounds like an appealing development to me. At that rate, my commute home would take roughly 6.3 seconds. [CNN]

More than $120 million

Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, is a very rich man. He’s worth some $700 million. Some of that might have been stolen. Allegations, assembled by Forbes, of money stolen or “wrongly siphoned” by Ross total more than $120 million. “If even half of the accusations are legitimate,” the magazine writes, Ross “could rank among the biggest grifters in American history.” In a statement to MSNBC, the Commerce Department said the Forbes article is “based on false rumors, innuendo and unverifiable claims.” [Forbes]

2 percent of Alexa users

“Hey, Alexa, buy something for me,” said almost no one ever. Only 2 percent of people who use Alexa-equipped “intelligent assistant” devices have used them to make a purchase this year, despite Alexa’s connection to online shopping behemoth Amazon.com. No word yet, however, on the timing until the singularity, when Alexas themselves begin buying Alexas, which in turn buy Alexas, and so forth, quickly draining what remains of the world’s usable resources and sparking violent riots, thereby effectively casting aside their primary competition: us. Alexa, order me a survival kit. [The Information]

80,000 kilometers of roadway

Places on Earth that were prosperous in the past, even the long-ago past, tend to be prosperous today. There are various theories about why: dynastic wealth, institutions like libraries and universities, military power. New research offers a new explanation: roads. Romans, like the Roman Empire Romans, built more than 80,000 kilometers of advanced roadway across Europe (a lot of them have lasted for centuries). And the density of those roads in a given place strongly correlates with — and caused, the researchers argue — that place’s prosperity today. [The Washington Post]

$137.5 million for five years

Jimmy Garoppolo, the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback, is the NFL’s most expensive lottery ticket, my colleagues wrote yesterday. Based on just five starts worth of work last season, he’s now set to earn $137.5 million over five years. It’s the most money earned by a player at the position based on such a small sample of play. Sure, they were five good starts that led to five wins, but just how good is a matter of some statistical debate. [FiveThirtyEight]

$30

(Sponsored by Mott & Bow) For many men, a simple t-shirt goes a long way, but not all t-shirt manufacturers think in terms of style and variety. Fortunately, a brand that boasts to offer the “softest and most stylish clean tees available on the internet” just added five new and unique t-shirt colors to their extensive list of options. At just $30 each, many men will see this as a prime opportunity to expand their t-shirt-day options.

2.4 million subscribers

Google’s YouTube, following similar actions by Apple, Facebook and Spotify, terminated the page of Infowars’ Alex Jones for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines,” reportedly related to hate speech and harassment. Jones had 2.4 million subscribers on the video service. YouTube had previously levied punishment against Jones in July, citing “child endangerment and hate speech.” [TechCrunch]

15 percent of victims

From the Department of Seriously Come On Enough Already, a new and scary tick species is invading the United States. It’s called the Asian long-horned tick — aka the bush tick, aka the cattle tick — and it has been found in seven eastern states. In Asia, this particular species “carries a virus that kills 15 percent of its victims,” according to the Times. [The New York Times]

+4.45 percent on the day

Facebook stock, which was still hurting from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and took a further historic nosedive in value last month, recovered somewhat on the news that the company had … asked large American banks to “share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances.” Capitalism, boy, I dunno. [The Wall Street Journal]

31 Michelin stars

Joël Robuchon, the most Michelin-decorated chef in history and the “Chef of the Century,” died on Monday at the age of 73. His most famous recipe was for “the humble mashed potato,” the BBC reports. It is said to be half potato and half butter. I will prepare it tonight in his honor. [BBC]

60 taste testers

Ferrero, the maker of Nutella and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, is hiring 60 taste testers to taste cacao, hazelnut and chocolate products. Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination. Take a look, and you’ll see into your imagination. We’ll begin with a spin traveling in the world of my creation. What we’ll see will defy explanation. [CBS News]

9 astronauts

Nine NASA astronauts — five of whom flew on the space shuttle — have been announced as the crew of new commercial spacecrafts built by Boeing and SpaceX. Beginning next year, these crafts will head toward the International Space Station in the first manned missions from the U.S. since the shuttle program ended seven years ago. [Space.com]

18 percent of Wikipedia biographies

Only 18 percent of the biographical entries on Wikipedia are of women. A machine learning tool called Quicksilver is trying to change that, poring over news articles and academic literature to find scientists who merit inclusion on the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and composing draft entries for them. It’s already found 40,000 such missing scientists (both men and women). [Wired]

24-point gender gap

In 2016, according to exit polls, women voted for Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points and men voted for President Trump by 11 points — a “gender gap” of 24 points, the biggest in history. Recent, high-quality polls in the national popular vote for the House have shown a similar, and in a couple of cases even larger, gender gap. If that holds it’d be the largest gap in House races in at least 26 years. [FiveThirtyEight]

25 minutes of sleep

A recent study in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization found that having high-speed internet access causes people to lose 25 minutes of sleep per night, compared to those people without it, as that access “promotes excessive electronic media use.” I can confirm this finding, he typed, between sips of his third coffee of the day. [Motherboard]

429 executions

Michael Graczyk worked as an Associated Press reporter who, as part of his professional duties in Texas, witnessed 429 executions, “far more than any American.” He retired last month, but plans to continue covering executions as a freelancer. [The Guardian]

$160 million

The late Jerry and Rita Alter lived a frugal life in Cliff, New Mexico, population somewhere shy of 300. After they died, a painting by Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist master, worth an estimated $160 million, was found in their bedroom. The painting had gone missing more than three decades earlier from a museum in Arizona. For the rest of the story, I recommend you read this story from the Post. [The Washington Post]

]]>187857Oliver Roederhttps://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/oliver-roeder/oliver.roeder@fivethirtyeight.comThe Eternal Question: How Much Do These Apricots Weigh?https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-eternal-question-how-much-do-these-apricots-weigh/
Fri, 03 Aug 2018 12:00:24 +0000https://fivethirtyeight.com/?post_type=fte_features&p=187727Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. There are two types: Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either,2 and you may get a shoutout in next week’s column. If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.

Quick announcement: Have you enjoyed the puzzles in this column? If so, I’m pleased to tell you that we’ve collected many of the best, along with some that have never been seen before, in a real live book! It’s called “The Riddler,” and it will be released in October — just in time for loads of great holidays. It’s a physical testament to the mathematical collaboration that you, Riddler Nation, have helped build here, which in my estimation is the best of its kind. So I hope you’ll check out the book, devour the puzzles anew, and keep adding to our nation by sharing the book with loved ones.

And now, to this week’s puzzles!

Riddler Express

From Steve Gaukrodger, a small fruity puzzle:

You loaded a drying shed containing 1,000 kilograms of apricots. They were 99 percent water. After a day in the shed, they are now 98 percent water. How much do the apricots weigh now?

Riddler Classic

From Michael Wales, flip and flip and flip some more:

I flip a coin. If it’s heads, I’ve won the game. If it’s tails, then I have to flip again, now needing to get two heads in a row to win. If, on my second toss, I get another tails instead of a heads, then I now need three heads in a row to win. If, instead, I get a heads on my second toss (having flipped a tails on the first toss) then I still need to get a second heads to have two heads in a row and win, but if my next toss is a tails (having thus tossed tails-heads-tails), I now need to flip three heads in a row to win, and so on. The more tails you’ve tossed, the more heads in a row you’ll need to win this game.

I may flip a potentially infinite number of times, always needing to flip a series of N heads in a row to win, where N is T + 1 and T is the number of cumulative tails tossed. I win when I flip the required number of heads in a row.

What are my chances of winning this game? (A computer program could calculate the probability to any degree of precision, but is there a more elegant mathematical expression for the probability of winning?)

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Last week brought us to Riddler Laboratories, where you wanted to spin some samples in a centrifuge. To run safely, the centrifuge needed to be perfectly balanced along every axis; otherwise, the torque would damage the internal rotor. If a centrifuge has N equally spaced buckets, some of which you’d like to fill with K samples, and all samples are of equal weight, for what values of K can all the samples be spun in the centrifuge safely?

It turns out that we need to know some things about prime numbers to work safely in Riddler Lab. Specifically, as our winner Stephen explained, we can balance K samples in N buckets if and only if both K and N – K are expressible as the sum of prime factors of N.

For example, we can safely run seven samples (K = 7) in a 12-bucket centrifuge (N = 12). In this case, N has the prime factors 2 and 3, and we can add 2 + 2 + 3 = 7 to get to K, and 2 + 3 = 5 to get to N – K. We cannot, however, safely run 10 samples (K = 10) in a 21-bucket centrifuge (N = 21). In this case, N has the prime factors 3 and 7, and there is no way to add copies of these to get to N – K, i.e., 11.

Why does this formulation based on prime factors work? Solver Gavin Stewart explained it by talking about how you place the samples in the centrifuge. If one arrangement works (say, four samples) and another arrangement works (say, three samples), then an arrangement that combines those two others (four and three, say) will also work.

Stewart went into the math of it all: “Use the 12 buckets as an example: If you have five samples, 5 = 2 + 3 and 12 – 5 = 4 + 3, so it can balance. This can be done by using an arrangement of two samples together with a arrangement of three samples. However, with 11 samples: 11 = 4 + 4 + 3, meets the condition, but 12 – 11 = 1 does not. For the given example of N = 21 and K = 10: 10 = 7 + 3, but 21 – 10 can never be written as a sum of factors of 21. This also means that for a prime N, the only way to ever balance the centrifuge is with N samples. This also shows why 12 is a good number of buckets, because every number of samples can be balanced except for 1 and 11. It’s worth noting that K = 1 and K = N – 1 will never balance; so 12 is essentially a perfect number of buckets.”

Indeed, my unscientific survey of Amazon revealed many centrifuges with spaces for 12 samples. This problem has also been the subject of some academic study, and you can find a further mathematical discussion of the solution in this 2010 paper.

Solver Thomas Woodruff, on the other hand, submitted an out-of-the-box solution: Any number of samples can work, he wrote. Simply “add a number of centrifuge tubes filled with water necessary to balance the centrifuge.”

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Last week, we introduced the perfect puzzle for doodling during a boring class or meeting. Start with an empty 5-by-5 grid of squares, and choose any square you want as your starting square. The rules for moving through the grid from there are strict: 1) You may move exactly three cells horizontally or vertically, or you may move exactly two cells diagonally; 2) you are not allowed to visit any cell you already visited; and 3) you are not allowed to step outside the grid. You win if you are able to visit all 25 cells. Is it possible to win? If so, how? If not, what are the largest and smallest numbers of squares you can legally visit?

And another, from Hernando Cortina, who reports that he was indeed in a meeting when he solved the doodle game:

Solver Toby Roberts explained his approach: “I used Excel to map out the 25*8^24 path permutations (25 starting squares and 8 cardinal directions for each of 24 moves), stopping whenever a path either a) left the grid or b) repeated a square previously visited. It turns out that there are 12,400 unique paths that lead to a win. The number of paths to a win varies depending on which square you start with. The center square has the fewest winning paths (352), the squares surrounding the center square have more paths (400 or 412), and the squares on the outside have the most winning paths (548 or 552).”

Geoff Sutton verified that 12,400 number, also finding that the worst you can possibly do is to visit just eight squares:

There are 12400 ways to visit all 25 squares. The smallest number of squares you can visit and have no moves left is 8, and there are 32 ways to do this. pic.twitter.com/72SkAoDLYg

$1 trillion company

Apple is the world’s first trillion-dollar company. With what I spent to repair my iPhone screen, this comes as no surprise. [Bloomberg, The New York Times]

A few hundred Google employees

Google (a lowly $850 billion company) is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, a fact previously known only to “a few hundred” of its 88,000 employees. The project is code-named Dragonfly and will, according to The Intercept, block sites and searches related to “human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.” [The Intercept]

No more than 30 percent women

For years, Tokyo Medical University altered the test scores of its female applicants to limit successful applicants to no more than 30 percent women. An unnamed official at the school called it a “necessary evil,” citing “worries that women will drop out of the workforce once they become pregnant.” The school reportedly wanted to make sure it had enough doctors staffing its affiliated hospital. [Quartz]

5 out of 9 House members

Time was that being a member of Congress gave a person a big advantage when running for other offices, like governor or senator. But that hasn’t really been the case lately. Only five out of nine such congressional representatives have been successful in their primaries this year, and three of those wins came against “unserious or nonexistent challengers.” Only three out of six such bids were successful in 2016. [FiveThirtyEight]

7 puppies

Who says nothing exciting ever happens on uninhabited northern Manitoba islands? Just this week, a litter of seven puppies was rescued from one such island after being discovered by boaters. They’ve been dubbed the “‘Gilligan’s Island’ crew.” “It’s not clear how the pups ended up on the island,” the CBC reports. [CBC]

$4,000 medal

Remember Wednesday when the Fields Medal winners were announced? Boy, that sure was fun while it lasted. Minutes after Caucher Birkar, a Cambridge mathematician, won his medal, that medal — a 14-karat gold, 2.5-inch-wide, $4,000 award — was stolen. Organizers said that “images recorded at the event are being analyzed” in the hunt for the thief. [The Washington Post]

4 medalists

Four winners of the Fields Medal — like the Nobel Prize for math but awarded only once every four years, and only to mathematicians age 40 and younger — were announced Wednesday: Peter Scholze, Caucher Birkar, Alessio Figalli and Akshay Venkatesh. Scholze, at 30, is one of the youngest winners ever. His website includes recent papers with titles such as “p-adic geometry,” “Projectivity of the Witt vector affine Grassmannian” and “Perfectoid spaces and their Applications.” [The New York Times]

£45 to £100 tickets

The 2018 World Chess Championship will be held at The College, the former home of Central Saint Martins College, in the Holborn district of central London. Tickets to the November match will run from £45 to £100. The defending champion and world No. 1, Magnus Carlsen, will face American challenger and world No. 2 Fabiano Caruana over the course of the three-week match. Caruana is the first American to vie for an uncontested world championship since Bobby Fischer in 1972. [BBC]

41 percent of hospital beds

My colleagues Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Anna Maria Barry-Jester have been publishing a series on the role of religion in health care. In their most recent piece, they explore the fact that insurers can funnel patients to Catholic hospitals, which in turn can restrict the reproductive care available to the patient. “Thanks to a wave of mergers and consolidations that has been reshaping the U.S. health care system,” they write, “Catholic hospitals are playing a bigger role in patient care.” This is especially true in the Midwest. In Wisconsin, for example, 41 percent of hospital beds are in Catholic hospitals. [FiveThirtyEight]

81 candidates

Former President Obama tweeted out to his 102 million followers a list of 81 Democratic candidates in the midterm elections that he was “proud to endorse.” The candidates are diverse geographically as well as in the offices they are seeking. They include candidates for governor, House, Senate and state legislatures. [USA Today]

More than 100 episodes

People like to say that the period of roughly 2016 to the present has been unprecedentedly bizarre and that if you traveled here in a time machine you could do little but gawk and think “WTF?” But I submit that the era of 1986-1990, when NBC aired four seasons and more than 100 episodes of a sitcom starring a Muppet-esque alien from Melmac who lands in a suburban garage and then just, like, lives there with the family — and I think in one episode turns the AC up in an attempt to create an ice rink in the basement — was much weirder. My theory is complicated now, however, as Warner Bros. is preparing to reboot the series. [Variety]

2020

That’s the contact expiry and possible year of departure from “Jeopardy!” of its longtime host, Alex Trebek. So Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. [TMZ]

]]>187627Oliver Roederhttps://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/oliver-roeder/oliver.roeder@fivethirtyeight.comDamn, We Wish We’d Done These 4 Stories Last Monthhttps://fivethirtyeight.com/features/damn-we-wish-wed-done-these-4-stories-last-month-2/
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 19:13:13 +0000https://fivethirtyeight.com/?post_type=fte_features&p=187686At the end of every year, we’re jealous of Bloomberg’s “Jealousy List,” a collection of stories that staffers wish they had published. We’re so jealous that we’re making monthly lists of our own.

So here are four stories published by other journalists last month that made us envious. Hopefully, our jealousy will lead to your discovery.

Nike claims that runners who wear the company’s pricey Zoom Vaporfly 4% running shoes can see efficiency gains of up to 4 percent. That’s a lot in a sport with slim margins between winning and losing. But are those numbers correct? Lab studies are limited by their small sample sizes, but The Upshot was not. Kevin Quealy and Josh Katz used tens of thousands of real-life performance records from the Strava app to look beyond the Nike-sponsored lab studies and find out how the shoes performed in real events. That’s really cool, and what I really admired about the piece was the detailed yet accessible way that Quealy and Katz described their methodology and explained the strengths and weaknesses of the numerous analytic approaches they tried. No matter how they sliced the data, it pointed to a similar conclusion: Runners really did seem to perform better when wearing the Nike shoes.

Sometimes, just sometimes, data visualization can infuse the daily, the boring and the rote with a sort of deep and austere beauty. The American Time Use Survey is one example: We wake up, we go to work, we go home, we eat, we go to bed. But aggregate those familiar actions across all of us, and visualize them, and it’s a stark and lovely portrait of our collective self. These maps from Bloomberg are another example. We farm, we build houses, we build airports, we protect public parkland. Aggregate it and map it, and it’s a beautiful portrait of the “1.9 billion-acre jigsaw” we call the United States.— Oliver Roeder, senior writer

I shuttle between Boston and New York at least once a month. Despite the cities’ significant difference in size, their geographies take up the same amount of space in my mind. The explanation for that might lie in these charts, which summarize the orientations of major U.S. city grids. Manhattan is almost purely orthogonal, while Boston is a rat’s nest of byways.

Are you still suffering from World Cup withdrawal? Me too. Which is probably why I’ve read and reread this piece from The Washington Post so many times since the end of the tournament. It takes a pretty confusing stat — expected goals — and makes it digestible and relatable. Soccer statheads still debate how much weight you should put on expected goals, and this article does well to present the benefits and pitfalls of that stat. Plus, it gives you a reason to rewatch Benjamin Pavard’s incredible goal for the millionth time.

2,973,371 Russian troll tweets

Yesterday, we published nearly 3 million tweets sent from the Russian “troll factory” called the Internet Research Agency, both before and after the 2016 election. The database is the work of two scholars from Clemson University, and we believe it to be the most extensive empirical accounting of Russian political and election meddling on social media. It reveals a systematic onslaught, complete with a division of labor including “Right Trolls,” “Left Trolls” and “Fearmongers.” [FiveThirtyEight]

32 pages and accounts

And speaking of Russians on social media, Facebook yesterday announced that it had uncovered a “coordinated political influence campaign” ahead of the midterm elections on its service, and that, per the Times, “Russia was possibly involved.” The company said it removed 32 pages and accounts, which had a combined 290,000 followers, and that “bore some similarities to that of the Internet Research Agency.” [The New York Times]

$550 to ditch your car

Lyft, the on-demand transportation company, will give 100 Chicagoans $550 in Lyft and other transportation credit if they agree to ditch their own car for a month. Hmm, I haven’t had a car in years. Dear Lyft CEO Logan Green: My Venmo is @oliver-roeder. If my math is right, you owe me about $40,000. [The Verge]

65 potential jurors

Yesterday was jury selection day in the trial of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman who is facing a maximum of 305 years in prison for violating tax and banking laws. The pool was composed of 65 potential jurors who were whittled down and sworn in to a jury of 12: six men and six women. [CNN]

More than 1,000 people

A federal judge on Tuesday granted a temporary restraining order that blocked plans for 3-D printable guns from being made freely and publicly available online just hours before their scheduled release. These guns can be plastic and untraceable. Some plans had gone online Friday, and more than 1,000 people had already downloaded those for an AR-15, according to Pennsylvania’s attorney general. Despite the fact that his administration cleared the way for these plans to be republished, Trump tweeted, “I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn’t seem to make much sense!” [The Washington Post]

1.9 billion acres

Bloomberg published some lovely and spellbinding maps about how America uses its land — “a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures.” My favorite little detail: the single pixel on the final map devoted to Christmas trees. [Bloomberg]

$5,956

Some in the city of Austin, Texas, former home of your humble SigDig columnist, have raised the possibility of changing its name. Stephen F. Austin, the city’s namesake and so-called “Father of Texas,” opposed a Mexican plan to ban slavery “in the province of Tejas,” so Austin’s Equity Office is suggesting the city should go by a different name. Also up for renaming are a number of streets, including Dixie Drive, Confederate Avenue and Plantation Road. That street renaming would reportedly cost $5,956. [Austin American-Statesman]

42 open seats

As of today, there are 98 days until the midterm elections. The battleground for the House is broad, writes The Upshot, including “a long list of working-class and rural districts that voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016.” Thanks to a spate of retirements, there are 42 open seats in which Democrats hope to make inroads. [The Upshot]

$10,000 in vest sales

The humble vest has become a modern symbol of high capitalism for the Silicon Valley set. (Throw out your canes, top hats and monocles.) In the San Francisco airport — where else? — there is a Uniqlo vending machine that dispenses vests. It being San Francisco and all, the vending machine brings down an average of $10,000 a month, per a representative of the airport. [Business Insider]

4 runs in the 6th inning

Some people apparently, to my shock and dismay, leave baseball games early. For those people, some FiveThirtyEight contributors have provided a cheat sheet on when it’s “safe” to leave. For example, you “should” leave after the sixth inning if the leader is ahead by at least four runs — there’s a 95 percent chance you won’t miss a comeback. But until you have sat through a blowout both frozen and fried (sometimes in the same month) in nearly-empty Wrigley bleachers with a beer in one hand and (when applicable) a hot chocolate in the other, with term papers yet to write and emails yet to return and bills yet to pay, you have really yet to live. [FiveThirtyEight]

F4-466 instead of F4-468

Yesterday, like many, many other days in recent memory, saw a hellish commute for many on the sclerotic public transportation system of New York City, the biggest and “greatest” city in the country. This one, at least, was a fresh hell. It was caused by a single Metropolitan Transportation Authority typo on a work order — signal F4-466 instead of F4-468 — which caused inexplicable walls to spring up over should-have-been-active tracks, rerouted trains off the express route, piled up trains behind those, and just all around caused mayhem. Fun! [The Village Voice]

3 people, 1 shark

Two men and one woman stole a shark from an aquarium by disguising it as a baby. The end. [KSAT]

“90%”

Following a meeting with New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, President Trump yesterday claimed that “90% of media coverage of my Administration is negative,” that the media has been “driven insane,” that they are “Very unpatriotic!,” that they were engaged in distraction and cover-ups, and that their coverage “truly puts the lives of many … at risk.” It was unclear whether the president was including Significant Digits in his rant. [The Hill]

19 years at Dow Chemical

That’s a line item on the resume of Peter Wright, a lawyer nominated in March by Trump to run the EPA’s Superfund toxic cleanup program. He once described himself as “the company’s dioxin lawyer.” (Dioxin is a toxic chemical which Dow once released into the Tittabawassee River, contaminating more than 50 miles of river and lake.) Unsurprisingly, I think it’s abundantly fair to say, this nomination has raised all sorts of chemically tinged red flags, which you can read more about in this piece from the Times. [The New York Times]

+76 PARG

Last week, my colleagues introduced a new stat, which is one of my favorite things my colleagues do. It’s called PARG — Popularity Above Replacement Governor — and it’s calculated by measuring the distance between a governor’s net approval rating and his or her state’s partisan lean. Leading the inaugural PARG list is Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, with a healthy +76 PARG. At the bottom is Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, with an unhealthy PARG of -93. [FiveThirtyEight]

1 minute and 51 seconds

Geraint Thomas of Wales won the Tour de France yesterday, one minute and 51 seconds ahead of the second-place finisher, after 21 stages over three weeks and 2,000 miles. I imagine Thomas’s immediate celebratory plans include a lot of not riding a bicycle. [BBC]

12-year McDonald’s scam

One day in 2001, in Rhode Island, a crew claiming to be from McDonald’s showed up at a man’s door with video cameras and a giant cashier’s check to celebrate his $1 million winnings from the restaurant’s long-running Monopoly game — wherein you peel real estate “properties” from Cokes and packs of fries, etc., trying to make certain sets to win prizes. The problem for this man, however, was that the crew was really undercover FBI agents. For over a decade, McD’s Monopoly game was the target of a major and colorful criminal conspiracy. [Daily Beast]

“Something like 183 unique conversations on tape”

So said President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani over the weekend, regarding what exactly federal investigators had seized from Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney. Giuliani also implied that Trump is heard on only one of those tapes, and that there are “maybe 11 or 12 others” on which Trump is discussed at any length. [CBS News]

]]>187427Oliver Roederhttps://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/oliver-roeder/oliver.roeder@fivethirtyeight.comThe Perfect Doodle Puzzle To Keep You Busy During Boring Meetingshttps://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-perfect-doodle-puzzle-to-keep-you-busy-during-boring-meetings/
Fri, 27 Jul 2018 12:00:29 +0000https://fivethirtyeight.com/?post_type=fte_features&p=187331Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. There are two types: Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either,3 and you may get a shoutout in next week’s column. If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.

Quick announcement: Have you enjoyed the puzzles in this column? If so, I’m pleased to tell you that we’ve collected many of the best, along with some that have never been seen before, in a real live book! It’s called “The Riddler,” and it will be released in October — just in time for loads of great holidays. It’s a physical testament to the mathematical collaboration that you, Riddler Nation, have helped build here, which in my estimation is the best of its kind. So I hope you’ll check out the book, devour the puzzles anew, and keep adding to our nation by sharing the book with loved ones.

And now, to this week’s puzzles!

Riddler Express

From Daniel Jepson, put on your lab coat and step into Riddler Laboratories:

A centrifuge needs to be perfectly balanced along every axis before being run; otherwise, the torque will damage the internal rotor. If a centrifuge has N equally spaced buckets, some of which you’d like to fill with K samples, and all samples are of equal weight, for what values of K can all the samples be spun in the centrifuge safely?

Hint: You can run seven samples in a 12-bucket centrifuge. But you cannot run 10 samples in a 21-bucket centrifuge.

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Last week brought a numismatic puzzle: If Riddler Nation needed to make change (anywhere from 0.01 to 0.99) and was establishing its own mint, what values of coins would be ideal to yield the smallest number of coins in any transaction? When picking values, let’s say we’re limiting our mint to producing four coin denominations — replacing the current common American ones of penny, nickel, dime and quarter.

Picking one of the four Riddler Cash (℟) coins is easy: We know we’re going to need a 1¢ coin, because there’s no way to make ℟0.01 change without it. The other three coins we mint should have denominations of 5¢, 18¢ and 25¢.

The current system of penny, nickel, dime and quarter requires 4.7 coins to make change on average. A new system of penny, nickel, 18¢ and quarter denominations requires only 3.9 coins on average.

So it turns out that the current system isn’t too bad — we’d only need to change one denomination (stupid, tiny dimes) to achieve optimal change-making. The 18¢ piece makes certain values that were tough to create much easier. For example, to give 18¢ change under the current system, we’d need five coins — a dime, a nickel and three pennies. Now we need only one. Arriving at this solution, or any relatively efficient scheme, involves some guessing and checking, or computer programming. The key is to space your denominations so they efficiently account for all amounts between 0.01 and 0.99.

Solver Jochen Rick got to this result with a brute force program, and solver Tom Singer shared his write-up, wherein he employed a recursive algorithm. And, in fact, this problem has its own Wikipedia page, complete with code. Academic computer scientists have also tackled this problem, in one case in a paper titled “What This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece.” Amen — that’ll solve everything.

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Last week found you at the helm of a ship in a precarious wartime situation. You were out to sea, wanting to get back safely to your home port. However, you spotted an enemy submarine sitting exactly halfway between you and the port. To sink you, the sub needed to be directly beneath your ship. The submarine submerged to some fixed depth, and you had no further information about its location or movement. The sub, however, could track your movement and respond efficiently. If you were fast enough, though, you could plot a wide course around the enemy and get home safely. How much faster than the sub did your ship need to be to ensure a safe arrival?

You need to be about 2.33 times faster.

This puzzle’s submitter, Mike Donner, explained why. Let’s say your ship must be at the very least k times faster than the submarine to get home safely. Since the submarine is halfway between you and the port, we know the ship needs to be more than two times faster — that is, k > 2. If that weren’t the case, the submarine could simply head straight toward your port and sink you there. We also know that if your ship is more than π times faster — that is, k > π — you could plot a full semicircular path around the sub’s starting location (making the distance between you and it the radius of the circle) and beat it home. So now we know the answer we seek — k — is somewhere between 2 and π.

But a straight line is not a wide enough route, and a semicircle is wider than it needs to be — we can be more efficient in our submarine-avoidance tactics.

Solver Thad Beier animated the situation you faced and the path you should take:

There are two sections to your efficient journey back to port, and they involve you baiting the submarine to come meet you before you speed past. The first is a beeline northwest, the second a curved course generally southwest. To solve for k, we need to put some math on top of this path.

Suppose the submarine starts at point (0, 0), your ship starts at point (1, 0), and your home port lies at point (-1, 0). The path we’re interested in examining happens when the ship plots a course around the sub such that given any angle, \(\theta\), the sub tries to intercept (starting after some angle \(\theta_i\)), the vessels arrive at the exact same time. Mike illustrated that like so:

So we have one polar curve ending at (-1, 0) and one straight line that meets it at \((x_i, y_i)\). Those two pieces also have the same slope at that point. Finally, the curved section of the path has the property that, as the angle \(\theta\) increases, the arc length increases k times as much as the radius, r, increases, like so:

This, in turn, leads to lots of painful calculus, trigonometry and algebra on our search for k. (My apologies, but hey, if navigating around an enemy sub were easy, everyone would do it.) You can find Mike’s full solution here. Additionally, you can find our winner Glenn’s work here and solver Sawyer Tabony’s tidy, tweet-sized solution here:

3 missing chapters

Some of the three rumored missing chapters from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” reportedly deemed too incendiary to publish and the stuff of scholarly myth — and honestly, what is better than scholarly myth? — appeared at auction yesterday. An unpublished chapter was bought by the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for $7,000, along with the manuscript for the book containing its authors’ dense and complex notes. [The New York Times]

20 miles from the White House

The Upshot published a fascinating and fine-grained map of the 2016 presidential election results, introduced with the question, “Do you live in a political bubble?” For example, I learned that my precinct in Brooklyn was in the 87th percentile for Hillary Clinton, but that the nearest Trump precinct is only one block away. President Trump himself, on the other hand, would have to drive 20 miles from the White House to wind up in a precinct that voted for him. [The Upshot]

28 members of Congress

Amazon’s facial-recognition software, called Rekognition (yeesh), falsely matched photos of 28 members of Congress with a mug shot database, misidentifying the legislators as former criminals, according to the ACLU. Amazon claimed that the ACLU hadn’t set the software’s confidence threshold high enough. [NPR]

39 Republicans and 18 Democrats

Depending on how you count, something like 39 Republicans and 18 Democrats in Congress are not running for reelection, my colleague Nathaniel Rakich writes. Of those, 26 Republicans and eight Democrats are ending their political careers altogether. It’s the most “pure” retirements by Republicans and the fewest by Democrats in 10 years. [FiveThirtyEight]

119 of 270 National Assembly seats

Imran Khan, a former cricket star, declared victory yesterday in the parliamentary election in Pakistan. Amid technical problems and accusations of vote rigging, news reports indicated that his Tehreek-e-Insaf party had a commanding lead. Khan promised to fight corruption and to reimagine Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S., which he sees as “one-sided.” [AP]

More than $15 billion

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, lost more than $15 billion. Yesterday. Facebook’s value fell by nearly four times the entire market cap of Twitter. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. [Reuters]

1 hour and 42 minutes

Nothing brings us together as a species quite like the brief alignment of heavenly bodies. And this Friday will bring a special treat: an extra-long lunar eclipse, lasting one hour and 42 minutes. (The longest this century, according to NASA.) So ready your binoculars and … oh, crap. It’s not visible from North America. Figures. Well, request a vacation day quickly, go go go. Tell your boss he or she can give me a call. [NPR]

2 congressmen

Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, both Republicans and leaders of the House Freedom Caucus, introduced a resolution yesterday to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the man who oversees the special counsel’s Russia investigation. The resolution is not a sign, however, according to CNN, that the House is close to a vote on impeaching Rosenstein. The chairmen of the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee did not sign onto the resolution. [CNN]

1 Martian lake (probably)

Researchers have discovered what they believe to be a lake, about 12 miles across, under the southern polar ice cap of Mars. It’s the first sign of an extant, persistent body of water on the red planet. “It’s probably not a very large lake,” said the man from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics who led the study and who, with all due respect, I fear may be missing the point. [BBC]

17 percent plunge

Facebook (if you haven’t heard of it, ask your parents) missed its revenue and user projections for this quarter. The … embattled social media company (“embattled” is the word, right?) has been grappling, or not, with big scandals concerning data security and its promulgation of fake news. Facebook stock fell 17 percent on the misses in premarket trading on Thursday. [CNBC]

76 ducklings

Take a breath, time for a brief respite. Last month, an amateur wildlife photographer took an eight-foot plastic boat out on Minnesota’s Lake Bemidji and captured an extraordinary sight: one duck leading more than six dozen ducklings. No, they aren’t all her progeny. The common merganser was acting as the matriarch of a large brood, likely raising the “babies in a day care system that’s called a crèche,” according to experts on these sorts of matters. Make way for ducklings, indeed. [The New York Times]

5 million customers

The home DNA test kit company 23andMe is partnering with the drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline. The latter will use the test results from 5 million customers of the former to design new drugs. The latter has also invested $300 million in the former. [NBC News]

15-shilling novel

A graduate student working in the Royal Archives in England discovered a bill of sale from 1811. It showed a charge to the Prince Regent for 15 shillings for a copy of “Sense and Sensibility” — Jane Austen’s first novel. Given the bill’s date, scholars believe this to be the very first documented sale of an Austen novel. Austen herself, however, hated the prince, once criticizing in a letter his “gluttony, profligacy and infidelities.” [The New York Times]

80 feet long

Ain’t no story like a dinosaur discovery story. Twenty years ago, scientists dug up an enormous foot in Wyoming, nearly a meter wide. And they’ve now finally identified it. It apparently belonged to a brachiosaur that stretched some 80 feet long. It’s the largest sauropod dinosaur foot ever discovered and “the first confirmed pedal brachiosaur elements from the Late Jurassic of North America.” Pop the champagne! [Gizmodo]

1 million percent inflation

According to the IMF, inflation in Venezuela could exceed 1 million percent by the end of the year. In March, the Venezuelan president ordered that three zeroes be knocked off the denominations of the country’s bolivar currency. [CBS News]

33 million cord cutters

According to a media research firm, 33 million people — or 32.8 percent of television watchers — have cut the cord. That is, they’ve canceled pay TV in favor of “over the top,” or streaming, television services. That’s more than last year’s projections of 27.1 million, he typed as his shiny little black streaming device purred lovingly in the background. [Mashable]

2 billion years ago

So our galaxy, called the Milky Way, used to have a big sister galaxy, called M32p, a nice elliptical galaxy with lots of young stars. Cool, right? But, get this, another damn galaxy ate it. The Andromeda Galaxy, sort of a jerk, as it turns out, devoured big sis about 2 billion years ago. To make matters worse, Andromeda is a serial galaxy killer, thought to have done the same to hundreds of other smaller but well-meaning galaxies over the years. [Space.com]

$12 billion in emergency aid

Yesterday, the Department of Agriculture announced a $12 billion emergency aid package for farmers hurt by President Trump’s trade war with China and other countries. Trump, according to the Post, ordered the agriculture secretary to prepare a range of such options, to allay the negative effects of any trade disputes. [The Washington Post]

14-month ban

Ryan Lochte, the 12-time Olympic swimming medalist, has been suspended from the sport for 14 months. Lochte was suspended for getting an intravenous injection of a legal substance but in excess of the legal limit of 100 milliliters. One of Lochte’s social media accounts posted a picture of the swimmer getting the injection, with the hashtag “#ivdrip.” Lochte was previously suspended for 10 months following a drunken incident at the 2016 Olympics. [NBC Sports]

50 percent staff cut

The staff of the New York Daily News, the renowned tabloid which has called itself New York City’s “hometown paper,” was cut by 50 percent yesterday. The Daily News is owned by the most stupidly named and capitalized company in the history of companies — tronc. [Huffington Post]

60 tons of garbage

Since just last week, 60 tons of garbage have been removed from a beach in the capital of the Dominican Republic. There are thousands of tons of manmade plastic floating far out in the oceans — including the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But out of sight, out of mind can quickly become “pikes, shovels and excavators” following a heavy storm. [The New York Times]

106 degrees Fahrenheit

Japan set a dubious record on Monday, recording the country’s highest ever temperature — 41.1 degrees Celsius, or 106 degrees Fahrenheit — in a city northwest of Tokyo called Kumagaya. More than 40 people have died in Japan in an unprecedented heatwave that has lasted for nearly two weeks. [AP]

14,000 more suicides

Climate change has tragic — and unexpected — effects. One of those is its effect on the suicide rate. Suicide is more common on unusually hot days. And the authors of a recent Nature study estimate that, by 2050, climate change will cause an additional 14,020 suicides in the United States. The magnitude of this change is on par with “the estimated impact of economic recessions, suicide-prevention programs, or gun-restriction laws.” [The Atlantic]

$30 million tunnel

In a city constantly subjected to the torturous and sweltering whims of a broken public transit system, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the agency in charge of that system to spend $30 million on an utterly useless “vanity project.” Specifically, to retile two New York City tunnels in “the state’s blue-and-gold color scheme.” First of all, I didn’t even know we had such a state color scheme. And second, fix the damn subway. Please. [New York Post]